I recently stumbled across a blog I wrote in 2006 (!), and I thought I’d reprint it to show how my summers haven’t gotten all that worse in recent years: They were always worse.
Get me upset enough, and cliché’s will come out of the woodwork.
For instance, my daughters wanted to paint my youngest girl’s room:
“In a pig’s eye, over my dead body. In fact, I’ll be spinning in my grave when pigs fly over my dead body, because you’ll fall and break your leg and put somebody’s eye out, and when you do don’t come crawling to me!”
It turned out pretty nice, actually. It’s hard to describe the colors – they don’t have actual color names. Did you know Crayola put out a crayon called Macaroni and Cheese? That’s not a color, that’s a food. What, yellow’s not good enough?
Now the walls are, I don’t know, “Leaf”, and the trim is “effulgent”, or something. They painted the door a combination of “Veronica” and “Bile”.
See, my daughters concocted this scheme to move every room in the house to another room. My youngest would move into the spare bedroom, I’d take her bedroom, my office would go into my old bedroom, and our exercise equipment (go ahead, laugh it up) would go into the former office, once the dining room.
This was an ambitious plan for a family that once caused $7,500 in property damage and 8 lost work days assembling a bookcase.
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| This was taken several years later, but they still manage to cause trouble from time to time. |
I agreed because my daughter’s new room, the smallest bedroom (we call it “the hallway”), was painted a decade before, which means we didn’t have to remove the wallpaper. My home’s truly ugly wallpaper dates back to the art deco days of, what, the 60’s? 70’s? Back when it went with olive green kitchen appliances.
Under that is 50’s wallpaper. Under that is 30’s wallpaper. Under that – and I found my house on a 1901 map of Albion – is wallpaper from an unidentifiable period, although it appears to have been a time when there was no taste.
If I was an archeologist I’d be in hog heaven (see above about the flying pig’s eye). But no, I was a homeowner, removing wallpaper so old it had actually become part of the wall.
So I nixed the idea of painting anywhere else in the house (even though a few coats of Salmon or Ivy are desperately needed), but agreed to that one room. I looked forward to the end result: moving my office out of the room by the front door, which collects everything brought inside. My desk once collapsed under the weight of coats, junk mail, trash bags of junk food wrappers, and a stuffed trout. Never did find out where the fish came from.
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| This is the kind of thing I usually end up doing whenever someone wants to make “minor” improvements. |
We completely emptied rooms for the first time in fifteen years. It required a special trash pickup. We removed so much junk the house actually groaned in relief.
Turned out there was a closet in the spare bedroom. Who knew? A selection of what we found inside includes a 1986 Playboy magazine, a buffalo nickel, a camera I reported stolen in 1992, and an unopened set of spark plugs from a 1988 Ford Escort, a car we got rid of in 1991.
All of this was hidden behind a life size cutout of Natalie Portman as Queen Amidala. That’s gone now, since some wiseguy gave her a mustache with a dandelion colored crayon.
Then I removed several dozen nails from the walls, and applied spackle to repair gaping holes left behind, now that wallpaper no longer held those walls together. Spackle is a material that, once painted over, convinces you that your walls are in good shape. It’s the modern version of rose-colored glasses.
Finally, nothing was left but the painting. Easy, right? But the open stairway is in that second story room. The rest of the painting was fairly easy, especially since I put my daughters to work on it, but the dangerous part I did myself, because I’m dumb. I had to bring an extension ladder into the room (which itself makes for a great story). At one point, somehow, I was further above the base of the stairs than the roof level. I was so high, I could actually see my house from there.
Still, the painting was the quickest part of the project. It lasted only about a week, from the instant the paint mixer exploded in the face of the surprised store clerk, to the moment we gave up trying to remove the pumice colored paint that sloshed over onto our carpet. As for how long the cleaning and moving part took …
Well, now you know how I spent my summer vacation.